The many shades of Sir Bob

Sir Bob Geldof

Album cover

The title of Bob Geldof’s latest album — How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell — is a bit misleading.

Geldof has written his share of hits — most notably I Don’t Like Mondays with the Boomtown Rats — but he’s not the type of guy who caters to popular fashion. If anything, most people would probably think of him as an iconoclast.

“I was going to call it 58 ½, that was the age that I was when I was writing it,” Geldof says in an interview from England. “I thought I’d go back and be brutal with myself, go back to my punk days and just scrawl ‘58 ½’ on a piece of pink paper and that would be the sleeve.

“Then I was in L.A. at Rupert Hind’s house, the producer, and he had on his piano this book from the 1930s called How To Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell, so I just took a photograph of that and that became the album sleeve.

“I just thought it was funny, particularly ironic in my case. It wouldn’t be ironic if my name was Lord Gaga or something like that.”

It’s the kind of irony that has always defined Geldof.

He started out with the Boomtown Rats in the mid-’70s as a raging, angry punk rocker and then morphed into a hip spokesperson for the oppressed of Africa, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for famine relief through the Live Aid benefits in 1985. He received a knighthood at the age of 34 for his good works and continued to raise awareness about African famine through the international Live 8 concert series in 2005.

Yet Geldof has still managed to amass a personal fortune that has been estimated in the British Press at $50 million. He is chair of the London-based private equity firm 8 Miles. In February, the firm announced that it has attracted some $200 million in capital commitments for investment in Africa. The guy knows how to raise money.

Which makes me ask, “Bob, have you ever sat down and tried to write a popular song that would ‘sell’ … you know, like the album title says?”

“Yeah, that’s a good question. I did and I hated it. It worked, but I hated it,” Geldof responds.

He explains that his one attempt at commercial songwriting came in the early days of the Boomtown Rats.

“We were kids and we had two tracks just outside the Top-10 in the U.K.,” Geldof says. “The record company guys said, ‘if you don’t have a Top-10, it’s over.’ So I sat down to construct what I thought would be ‘Hey, a Top-10 smash,’ and it did go into the Top 10. But I’ve always despised it because of that. It was called She’s So Modern.”

Oddly enough, some of the songs on How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell did sell well in England. We’re not talking about megahit popular, but popular enough to break into the charts, get some moderate play on BBC 2 and draw some rave reviews. Not bad for a 60-year-old guy who doesn’t write pop songs.

A perky track called Silly Pretty Thing was particularly popular.

“That was a radio hit over here, which surprised me, because the truth is that I’m not interested in that … I was aware it sounded like a pop song, but I just didn’t think that one of my tracks would be a pop song at this point of my life.”

Unlike She’s So Modern, Geldof likes Silly Pretty Thing and will probably sing it when he brings his six-piece band to The Molson Canadian Studio at Hamilton Place this evening.

He’ll also likely play some of his old hits including Rat Trap and I Don’t Like Mondays. He didn’t intentionally write those songs as smash hits, either. Who could have imagined a song about a teenage mass killer reaching No. 1?

The upbeat nature of Silly Pretty Thing caught many British fans off guard, especially in contrast to his last solo album, 2001’s Sex, Age And Death, which reflected what was happening to Geldof at the time. It was written after his wife Paula Yates left him for INXS singer Michael Hutchence. Yates died of an overdose in 2000. Hutchence was found hanged in a hotel room in 1997.

“You can tell by the title where that record came from,” Geldof says.

In recent years, Geldof has found a new love, French actress Jeanne Marine.

“Most children of 19 and 20 understand perfectly well the position that love might hold in an individual’s life,” he says. “It took me until my dotage to understand that as I say in the song ‘life without love is meaningless.’ That is completely true. I learned that in a very extreme way 10 years ago, or whenever it was, and I came out the other side. I didn’t think that I would ever make another record again, not that that bothered me in the least.”

Bob Geldof

When: Thursday, Oct. 11, 8 p.m.

Where: Molson Canadian Studio at Hamilton Place

Tickets: $74.25 (plus applicable fees), available at Copps Coliseum box office, through Ticketmaster, or at the door.